A Big Storm Knocked It Over

by Laurie Colwin

  The night sky, like the God of Moses, was unending, incomprehensible, full of enormous, indecipherable messages. Who wouldn’t be anxious in the face of this?

  Teddy breathed happily. It was all science to him. He knew the constellations as familiars and often pointed them out to Jane Louise, who could recognize only the Big and Little Dippers. To Teddy the sky was as readable as a face. Teddy knew what he believed, and therefore the incomprehensible did not throw him into a swivet.

  “These mosquitoes are treating me like French toast,” Jane Louise said. “Anywhere there’s no repellent, they’re having a picnic.”

  “Look!” said Teddy. “There’s more!”

  Jane Louise lifted her face from his shoulder. She realized she had turned in her seat and was clinging to him. This really was some big deal. Above her was the amazingness of outer space, and meanwhile, she was a container for the miracle of inner space. The enormity of it made her tremble.

  The sky flashed. The comets blazed.

  “Martin Barlow made a pass at me in his study,” Jane Louise said.

  “What nerve!” Teddy said. “I hope you made him cringe like a dog.”

  “I did, actually,” said Jane Louise. “Teddy, I think I’ve had enough of these Perseids. They’re sort of giving me the creeps.”

  “Okay,” said Teddy. “Let’s go and give Little Catherine or Little Heathcliff a rest.”

  How simple it could be! The answer to the problem of being anything was being it. How admirable Teddy was! From the ashes of his broken childhood he had formed a decision to be a cheerful person, a do-gooding scientific type with a knowledge of English literature. That he had undercurrents of sadness as long and deep as a river was not the point. He had claimed a territory for himself and did not think too much about the complications. People settled on what they were going to be and were it, like Erna Hendershott, exemplary mother, wife, and editor, board member, needle-worker, superperson.

  Maybe being a mother, Jane Louise thought, would somehow make her immune to edges, snags, surprises, having passes made at her in sunlit studies by overzealous writers. She would have a baby and be all of a piece. The world would fall, gently as snow, into an attractive shape. She would find her place in the celestial order and no longer feel even the remotest twinge when insects like Sven crept around.

  “I’m freezing,” said Jane Louise.

  “I’ll warm you up,” said Teddy. He opened the screen door, and they walked slowly into the guest bedroom, where everything had happened with such apparent simplicity so long ago.

  CHAPTER 21

  In the summer Edie’s parents went abroad on judicial conferences, fund-raising missions, and art tours. Edie’s brothers and their wives split the house during July and August unless they went to the seashore. Edie never counted on the house. She had been cut out of this deal for a number of reasons: She had been in Paris, had been unmarried and, it was their opinion, had no interest in the country, especially since she had no children. The fact was that the Steinhauses preferred to pretend that Mokie and Edie did not live together and tried as best they could not to deal with it.

  “They do not want colored people leaving smears on their furniture,” Mokie said. “Basically, they hope someday I’ll take a magic shower and it will all wash off.”

  So Mokie and Edie rented a house less than a mile from Teddy’s mother so that they could spend the month with Jane Louise and Teddy. The house they rented was a collapsing farmhouse owned by a pair of psychologists named Helene and Paul Schreck.

  “And so aptly named!” said Mokie, who had studied German in college. The Schrecks had made it very clear that although they were friends of Edie’s parents, Edie and Mokie should be very grateful to have the privilege of paying a lot of money to live in their dirty house.

  The first week up Mokie took Teddy on a tour.

  “These people are eccentric,” he said. “It’s weird. A house in the country and not one single field guide. Hey, Ted! Look, black mold in the step of the fireplace, and yesterday we realized that the back porch steps are rotting. Is this some kind of country thing or are these people strange?”

  “They’re considered to be sort of incompetent,” Teddy said. “Naturally, my mother can’t stand them. She disapproves of wood chips around flowers, and she says that Helene hires someone to put the garden in and then sort of lets it die.”

  “Edie says there’s a large community of Japanese beetles on the roses,” Mokie said.

  “That’s better than termites in the foundation beams,” Edie said. “Why don’t we have lots of money instead of them?”

  “We’re nicer,” Mokie said. “Listen, come out and tell me if the porch is safe. It seems to be pulling away from the house.”

  “Why are we staying here?” Edie said.

  “To have fun!” Mokie said. “It is fun. I love this house. It dazzles this little colored boy.”

  Edie gave Jane Louise a long-suffering look.

  “Let’s eat,” she said. “Did you bring me that platter? I looked everywhere but they don’t seem to have one, although they did have some rotting leaves in the teapot.”

  “After dinner we will have a tour of the owner’s workroom,” Mokie said, carving the chicken. “And now we have an announcement. Janey, don’t be mad. I sat on Edie not to tell you. This is probably the only thing she hasn’t told you first, but here it is. We think our baby will come just a little after yours. What do you think of that?”

  “Oh, my goodness!” said Jane Louise. The news was everything she had ever wanted.

  It was one of those moments in which the world seems to stand absolutely still, as if in a photo taken by surprise. There they sat at the Schrecks’ ugly dining room table, lit by candlelight. They were eating roast chicken and scalloped tomatoes. Teddy wore an old blue shirt, and Mokie had on a ripped sweatshirt. Edie sat smiling in her chair, wearing one of her vintage dresses with a design of parasols on it. This is the night of a momentous announcement, Jane Louise thought. We ought never forget what we had for dinner, where we were, how we felt. And yet soon it would all be history, something from the distant past. Someday, if all went well, they would be sitting at some other dining room table with teenage children telling them about this very night so long, long ago.

  As she stared into the candles, she could see back to the first time she had met Edie, a gawky girl sitting on her dormitory bed mending a pair of polka-dot socks. She remembered the nights they had sat up drinking coffee and popping Dexamyls, trying to study for exams. She remembered Edie walking around hand in hand with Percy David, the tall, emaciated exchange student from England, and her passionate affair with horrible Fred Clarins. She remembered the hours, the days, the years they had spent hanging around in Marshallsville when Edie’s parents weren’t around.

  She could remember Edie in her little room in Paris telling Jane Louise about Mokie, and then meeting Mokie for dinner in an Algerian restaurant. They had had so, so much life together, and it seemed to Jane Louise that there was so much more in front of her. If all went well and their babies were born, they had eighteen years of parenting in front of them, four years of worrying about their children away at college. Why not marry them off right away, if one was a girl and one was a boy? The permutations and heartache, the wrong choices, the misery—the useless emotions all could be easily avoided.

  And there they were: a man who had lived most of his life in this place, who still came back to the house he had grown up in. A woman who had summered in this place all her life. A black man whose family and its traditions were from far away. A woman who had lived in any number of places as a child, who never summered anywhere, whose family plans were always thrown together at the last minute.

  Our children will learn to swim in this lake, and Teddy’s mother will give them little garden plots as she had given Teddy. She would pay them an allowance to pick the beetles off her roses and the caterpillars off her tomatoes. They would weed and hoe and go off to Peter
Peering’s to help pick peas. And would that stability make them into little snoots? If they were close to their families, would they grow up crooked and strange? Everyone at this table, Jane Louise thought, had struggled: Edie to get out from under her horrible brothers, and Mokie to leave his big, encompassing family and go to Paris, and Jane Louise to find some corner of the world to be steady in, and Teddy to transcend the early fracture of his life.

  We have ended up here, Jane Louise thought. It occurred to her that she was sleepy. The air was muggy and still. It was very hot. She looked across the table and saw that Edie was yawning.

  “You guys clear up,” Edie said. “Janey and I have to stretch out because of our delicate conditions.”

  They stretched out on the not-very-comfortable sofa in the Schrecks’ living room.

  “These people,” Edie said.

  “How could you have such a nice house and let it get so awful?” Jane Louise said. “Why would you put such horrible-looking stuff in a place like this?”

  “These people. . . .” said Edie sleepily. “If I just closed my eyes I could just drift off.”

  “Me, too,” said Jane Louise.

  And a few minutes later they were both asleep.

  CHAPTER 22

  It was suddenly sweltering. The sky was a strange gray-yellow, and the air stood still. Teddy and Mokie decided to go canoeing on the river. Edie and Jane Louise decided to drive to the library in Marshallsville Village and then have lunch.

  Jane Louise felt as heavy as the weather. Some of her clothes were beginning not to fit. Otherwise, she looked exactly as she had before, but she noticed her body slowing down. A peaceful kind of weightiness settled over her. She found it restful and benign.

  She and Edie walked slowly in the heat toward the library, a tidy stone building over whose portico grew an enormous wisteria. As they opened the door, a wave of delicious cool air breezed over them.

  “You know Franny Chaffee, don’t you?” Edie said.

  “The one with the silver hair,” Jane Louise said.

  “She is my idea of what a librarian should be,” Edie said. “A retired English teacher. She does this for fun.”

  “Oh, hello, Edie!” said a voice. Behind the desk stood a tall, gray-haired woman with a cupid’s-bow mouth. Her voice was girlish and sweet. “And isn’t that Jane Louise Parker?”

  Jane Louise was suddenly overcome with shyness.

  “You’re married to Teddy!” said Franny Chaffee, as if this fact had slipped by Jane Louise. “We all saw the announcement in the paper. Eleanor is so happy!”

  “Really?” said Jane Louise. She was afraid her voice might crack. The idea that Eleanor was happy because Teddy had married her was an unexpected gift.

  Jane Louise liked to pounce on books. Edie liked to browse. Jane Louise claimed her books and went outside on the municipal lawn. There was no relief from the heat. There seemed not to be much air to breathe. Next to an ornamental bench and under a catalpa tree was the stone marker bearing a brass plaque that she had never noticed before. Jane Louise put her books on the bench and knelt to see what the marker commemorated.

  THE YOUNG MEN OF MARSHALLSVILLE

  WHO GALLANTLY SERVED

  IN THE CONFLICT IN VIET-NAM

  Jane Louise read off the names. Theodore C. Parker. Peter S. Peering, Jr. Her own husband, commemorated on a plaque! How very deep in this place he was.

  “Did you know Teddy was on this plaque?” Jane Louise called to Edie as she came down the stairs.

  “Isn’t that funny,” Edie said. “Frankly, I never noticed it. Teddy and Peter never talk about it.”

  “He did say if we had a boy he was going to a Quaker school and registering for conscientious-objector status before he turns two.”

  “I guess that’s mentioning it,” Edie said.

  “I guess it is,” said Jane Louise. “God, it’s awful out. Is Warren’s restaurant air-conditioned?”

  “Warren’s from Florida,” said Edie. “It was the first thing he put in.”

  Jane Louise traced Teddy’s name with her fingers. She imagined him in jungle fatigues. She had seen his photos of Vietnam—he said every vet had piles of them—few of which contained any pictures of him. There was a photo in her office of a person lying on a slab of driftwood on a beach taken from a long distance. It was Teddy at the South China Sea, but it could have been anyone on any beach.

  She and Edie drove over to Warren’s, a little lunch and teahouse in town. The sky was an unmoving greenish lavender. There at a table they found Mokie, Teddy, and Peter Peering, sweaty and drinking a large pitcher of iced tea.

  “We thought you were going downriver,” Edie said.

  “The canoe outfitter isn’t renting because there’s a severe storm warning up,” Teddy said. “In fact, we ought to eat lunch and go home. This looks big.”

  “Don’t be squeamish,” said Peter. “It’ll blow over.”

  “Not this baby, it won’t. I hope you guys have plenty of candles,” Teddy said.

  “We don’t,” Edie said.

  “Well, go up to Phil’s and get some,” said Teddy.

  “Oh, you city slickers,” Peter said.

  “One hundred on a tornado,” Teddy said. He and Peter had been making bets on any old thing all their lives. They shook on it.

  As they got into cars, they could hear rumbling.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Jane Louise. “This looks very scary.”

  At home they checked Eleanor’s emergency stash: votive candles of every size, the bottled water, a portable gas ring, the three boxes of matches, flashlights, batteries.

  “Your mom,” Jane Louise said.

  “Mokie said those idiot Schrecks don’t have a thing, which is sort of amazing since you can count on losing power up here the year round.”

  They spread the candles out on the table and went and sat on the porch. A strange low wind was blowing. The sky had turned a more lurid purple. Jane Louise could feel the hair on the back of her arms stand up.

  “It’s so suffocating,” she said. “Is that pregnancy or what?”

  “Or what,” said Teddy. “It’s whatever this storm is.”

  They went around the house closing windows except for a crack. They lit two tall storm candles and put one in the bathtub and one in the bedroom. The first drops, heavy and furious, began to fall. Suddenly it was black, as if the night had fallen on top of them.

  The wind blew steadily, close to the ground. The rain rattled violently.

  “We may as well go upstairs and watch this from the bedroom,” Teddy said.

  “Aren’t we supposed to go into a cellar?” said Jane Louise.

  “If it looks bad we’ll lie on the floor,” Teddy said. “Besides, there aren’t any trees on this side of the house.”

  It was impossible to see across the road. In the house it was as black as a well. The wind roared through the trees. Heavy sheets of water pounded down with such force that the drops flew upward. Jane Louise held her breath. Jagged lightning flashed all over the sky. She felt herself clutching Teddy. She gave a kind of involuntary groan. They sat completely still. The lightning flashed as white as magnesium, filling the sky with an eerie, desiccated light.

  “Sit on the floor,” Teddy said.

  She huddled next to him on the floor. He put his arm around her and held her tight.

  “Are we going to die?” Jane Louise asked.

  “Not from this, darling,” he said. “We’re in a minitornado belt. We’ve had these before. It’s kind of thrilling.”

  The storm was directly overhead. There was a terrific tearing bang, and the bathroom light went out.

  “I wonder what came down,” Teddy said. “The transformer’s right up the road.” He picked up the telephone and heard nothing but static. As he turned to the window, a streak of lightning split a huge limb off the oak tree in the pasture.

  “Holy moly,” he said.

  Then suddenly the rain stopped. The wind died
down, but the sky stayed black. The thunder rumbled, farther away.

  “We’re out from under it,” Teddy said. “Where’s the flashlight? Let’s go downstairs and see what’s happening.”

  They walked downstairs as the rain started up again. The thunder could be heard booming in the mountains. They opened the front door and looked out: They couldn’t see a thing. The barn light across the street was out, and the sky was like ink.

  “There’s nothing for it,” Teddy said. “Let’s eat by candlelight.”

  They had their dinner and went upstairs. The storm was over. The sky had cleared. Thin ragged clouds floated across the night sky, lit by a quarter moon. Out in the pasture the fireflies were out. Their beams seemed enormous and luminescent, like halos, as if magnified by the charge in the air.

  Jane Louise and Teddy lay in bed holding hands.

  “I was really scared, Teddy,” Jane Louise said.

  “I know you were.”

  “Well, I’ve never been in a storm like that,” Jane Louise said. “I wasn’t in the war, like you.”

  She turned to him, and he looked like a boy: He looked naked and innocent. This was his house, the place from which he had gotten on a bus with Peter Peering and gone to a plane that took them to an army base. Then they had boarded a windowless transport, frightened quite beyond speech, and flown through the air to Southeast Asia. Even people you loved and lived with were barely knowable, thought Jane Louise. She wondered if Teddy had slept with anyone else in this bed.

  The air was strangely quiet, like someone who had sobbed herself out and fallen asleep. It was entirely still. She could hear the tree frogs calling to one another, and the soft trilling that Teddy told her was a screech owl.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 23

  When she returned to her office, Jane Louise was visibly more pregnant than she had been before she left. She had gone off in her first trimester and reappeared in her second. This to her was like changing time zones.

  Her only objection to pregnancy was the public aspect of it: None of her old clothes fit. She got bigger and bigger. People she did not even know noticed. This seemed to her an invasion of privacy. She did not yet have the nice round stomach of a woman further along and was therefore not quite ready to wear maternity clothes. She felt in a suspended state of something or other that she could not define.